The Smile’s new album is “pretty much done”.
The band – which includes Radiohead members Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood, and Sons of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner – have been busily working on their new record over recent times, and they can’t wait for fans to hear it.
Speaking about their creative process on the ‘Smartless’ podcast, Thom shared: “Jonny had come with a bunch of ideas, and I hadn’t seen him for a while, so they all just came pouring out before I could go, ‘Wait, wait, wait.’ There was a lot of me retrospectively going, ‘Okay, what am I going to do with that?’ Which was really nice.”
Thom admitted that he relished the challenge of making the new album.
He said: “I like trying to find different ways to write lyrics. I like to find different ways to assemble music. I like to learn new instruments, like Jonny.
“It wakes me up in the morning and probably always will, unless I lose my ability to think straight. There isn’t anything else. There’s not like, ‘Now we must move into this area,’ there’s not any sort of aesthetic agenda. You’re influenced by what you listen to. I’m always sort of buying new music.”
The veteran star also revealed that he has two distinctly different ways of making music.
He explained: “With lyrics, it’s something completely different where it’ll either be very quick, very easy, or months and months of chipping away, literally line by line, in the most painstakingly weird anal kind of: trying things, throwing them out, trying things, throwing them out, trying things, throwing them out.
“It gets to the point sometimes where it’s like, ‘well I’ve got this syllable, and I’ve got this consonant, and I’ve got this syllable, and now I’m just going to wait for the rest to turn up.'”